Occasional musings, Geistesblitze, photos, drawings etc. by a "resident alien", who has landed on American soil from a far-away planet called "Germany".

Sunday, January 31, 2016

Rainer Maria Rilke: Das Karussell (The Carousel)


Rilke's "Carousel" (1906) is one of the most charming poems in the German language. It tries to capture, through its rhythm and imagery, the fleeting sense impressions a spinning merry-go-round produces—it has become a classic of impressionist poetry. I was reminded of it when I visited yesterday the New England Carousel Museum in Bristol, which motivated me to try my hand at a non-rhyming line-by-line translation:

The Carousel—Original and Translation

This is not an exact literal translation. Rilke uses iambic pentameters consistently to render the movement of the carousel. Note especially how the poem picks up speed in the last stanza, and how the impressions get more blurry—this is masterfully done. Since inflected endings are rarer in English than they are in German, English words tend to be shorter than the corresponding German ones so that a literal translation often produces several stressed syllables in a row; that is, Rilke's iambic line gets lost. But I consider it important that English readers get a sense of the poem's rhythm and therefore added a little padding to recreate it (although I had to be content sometimes with fewer than five feet per line—adding more padding would have created distortions of its own by making the text wordier than the original).

6 comments:

Paul Mayer said...

I was unable to comment, directly, on the Carousel post you recently made on Facebook. I think you tied the English beautifully to the rhythm and intent of the original German. While my German has eroded horribly, I could still pick up on the meter and linguistic pacing, and experience Rilke's desire to capture the experience. My father would have appreciated your efforts...as do I!

Ulrich said...

Thank you, Paul! You cannot comment directly on the page with the poem--that's why I set up this page on my blog.

Bob Richmond said...

I really like this translation. When I was a US Army military dependent in Kaiserslautern in 1955, I discovered this poem in the old Insel-Buch Rilke: Gedichte I - which was my introduction to Rilke, when I was 15. I went on to major in German at Harvard and wrote my thesis on problems of translating Rilke, but I never tried to translate this poem.

Ulrich said...

Many years ago, I started a blog on Rilke:
https://krautblog-ulrich.blogspot.com/2008/07/new-topic_24.html

I was motivated, in part, by the low quality of the translations I found in English. I was especially appalled by translators like Gass who try to "clarify" what Rilke said--this is egregious, as poetry lives by ambiguity, and the last thing a translator should do is to take away this ambiguity and substitute an interpretation
I still shudder when I reread, in one of my comments, that Gass translates "enttäuscht wie ein Postamt am Sonntag" (disappointed like a post office on a Sunday) as "disappointing like a post office on a Sunday"--this is not a clarification, it's an outright falsification. In the original, it's the post office that is disappointed, and we, the readers have to speculate why this is so. In the translation, the post office is disappointing (to us); i.e. we are disappointed by the post office--my stomach turns...

Bob Richmond said...

Traduttore, traditore, as the saying goes. I think C.F. Meyer may have set the low standard a long time ago. Translations of Rilke have improved over the years.

Love your translations of Christian Morgenstern, another favorite of mine from my teen-age days in Germany, never mentioned in my German major. I particularly like your translation of that bête noir of Morgenstern translators, the weasel. Do more!

Sandra said...

Hi! I have emailed you with a question on this translation, which is so gorgeous! Thanks.